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It's a Numbers Game: The Truth About Graham Platner: Communist Past, Nazi Tattoo Controversy & Maine Senate Race
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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Welcome back to A numbers Game with Brian Grusky. Thank you guys for being here. So on this program I have talked a lot about politicians and taking them to task. People who pretend to be one thing in public and in private are monsters. And I've mostly focused on my own party people like Corey Mills and Tony Gonzalez who just recently dropped out of his reelection campaign. But, but today I'm going to talk about a Democrat, one of the most deceitful people running for office this year. His name is Graham Platner and he's running for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Maine against incumbent governor Jenna Mills in the primary and against Susan Collins, the incumbent senator in the general. Platner has quickly become a progressive darling, earning the endorsement of Bernie Sanders, Reuben Gallego, David Hogg, Gen Z for Change, Our Revolution, and the anti Israel track apac. He's raised millions of dollars across the country, mostly from small dollar donors. Close to 8 million more in the last quarter than either the governor or the senator. He's raised, and he's raised them on the back of the campaign that he is a true working class advocate, you know, and, and it's working. That plot, that plan, that selling point is working right now. He's got a very significant lead in the primary and a smaller but respectful one in the general. In the last six public polls, Platner led by an 12.5 points against Janet Mills and three and a half points against Susan Collins. Planner has spent the majority of his campaign really honing in on that working class image. And he's just an everyman, you know, he's the, he's the real version of what Pete Buttigieg and Beto o' Rourke and Tim Waltz and James Talarico pretend to be. He's speaking to the masses. He's a veteran and he's an oyster farmer. And he wants you to know over and over again I'm just a veteran and an oyster farmer. And to his credit, I will give him credit, he did serve in the Iraq war. He signed up in 2003, stating to the New Republic that even though he protested the war before signing up, he still signed up to serve and went to combat. He said his inspiration for serving was he read a lot of Ernest Hemingway. I just want you to hear that again. He read ernest hemingway at 17 and that's why he decided to go to war in Iraq. Of course, being something of an upstart and a fighter really came very easily to Platt very early in his yearbooks yearbook superlative. He was known as the most likely to start a revolution. And he held up a sign as yearbook stating free Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Kurdistan and Tibet. All of those are subjugated lands. They're all just suffering from colonization. He's anti colonization and from the ripe old age of 17, that's what he wanted you to know about him. Now he likes to create the narrative that he was radicalized by his time overseas fighting in Iraq, but clearly that's not true. He's always been a champagne socialist and the key word in there is champagne. We'll come back to that in a second. Anyway, he served four combat duties and he suffered from PTSD. He went to college on the GI Bill. In 2020, he took over an oyster farm which he says doesn't earn a lot of money. But him and his wife are able to get by over the nearly $5,000 a month he receives in benefits. As a disabled veteran, that's about as blue collar as it gets, right? Veteran oyster farmer. He's like, he's like the main version of Dan Connor from Roseanne. He's just an all around working class guy. Only Graham doesn't come from any version of a hard scrabbled existence. See, when he went to primary school, he went to a place called Hotchkiss, which is a private boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut. And then he went to John Baptist Memorial, you may ask. Wow, that sounds expensive. You know that's a boarding school. Yeah, that was a very expensive school. In today's dollars, Lakeville currently costs over $70,000 a year. And from my best search, John Baptist memorial is about 12,500. Much more reasonable than the first school, but still expensive. Not exactly a place that a working class person can afford to send their kids. And I get that it was years ago because he's in his. I think he's 41 now. But nonetheless it was expensive no matter when he went. See, Planner doesn't come from a working class background, despite all the flannel that he wears on the campaign trail. His grandfather was one of the world's most renowned archite and interior designers. You could still buy his furniture and it cost upwards of $20,000 per chair. His father was also a very successful lawyer. Graham likes to cosplay that he is his underdog and to a point, he is against the governor and the senator. But his family has long standing political ties in Maine. It's not A case of Mr. Smith goes to Washington. His father, Bronson Platner served as the assistant district attorney in Maine, ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate, and chaired a board of a local nonprofit that maintained close t the Senate majority leader, former secretary of defense, and former main governor. Platner's rugged exterior should be offensive to working class people. The same way it was offensive to black people that back in the day, in the early days of the movies, white actors would put on blackface pretending to be something that they are not. How wealthy is Platner's family? We don't know. But his father's wealthy enough they could drop $60,000 to support Democratic candidates running for office over the last 15 years. And that doesn't even include money he gave to local candidates run just in Maine. That's just federal candidates. 60 grand in 10 years. Not many people can afford to do that unless they have a lot of money. So the working class act is really a facade. Grand says he doesn't own any stocks and he doesn't, but you really don't need to when you likely have an inheritance. Look, I don't fault anyone for making a lot of money. I don't fault anybody for want to give that money to kids or protecting their children. That's totally honorable and admirable. What I do find something that needs to be held account is people lying and lying all the time, which is something Graham seems to have a problem with. He has a very unhealthy relationship with the truth. Let's start with the Graham's infamous tattoo. Now, this is the story you may have actually heard about Graham Platner was revealed that he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest of the Nazi skull and crossbones. It was called Tunk Tonkov, I believe that's what you pronounce it. It probably isn't, because you guys know I'm not great at pronouncing things. He apologized. He said he got another tattoo to cover it up. He said he received the tattoo in 2007 when he was on leave in Croatia on a drunken night with his military buddies. And he said that it was. He was totally unaware that it wasn't that had a connection to Hitler and the Nazis. And he told Pod save America, he's covered up and he's not a secret Nazi. He wants you to know I'm not a secret Nazi. He also proclaimed during the podcast that he was a World War II history buff, which is, I figure a World War II history buff might not. Might know, you know, what, what the skull and crossbows meant. And he says that he's been an anti fascist since he was 12 years old. That seems healthy for what a 12 year old should be thinking about. I don't know. You, I was at 12, I was probably watching X Men. I don't, I don't really think that I was thinking about fascism. But Graham Platner wants, you know, he's been doing this for a long time. CNN though reported that as early as 2020, Graham's friends said that he described it as a Nazi style tattoo. But I'm sure that's just probably the only time Graham seemed to connect himself with anti Jewish and authoritarianism. Right. Like he couldn't possibly have more connections with people who were anti Semitic and authoritarian. Wrong. See, as recently as 2021, when he was the ripe age of 36, Graham called himself a communist and a recreational drug user. He said I'm a vegetable growing psychedelic tasting socialist these days and then said, in fact I got older and became a communist. That would explain why in recent videos Graham has said that the United States should be working in cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, not in opposition. You know, that regime, that government that puts their own citizens in internment camps, forces abortion until like five minutes ago, manipulates their currency, steals our IP and funds our enemies. We should be working with them. That's Graham Platner's idea of foreign policy. We should just give them a big Graham Platner bear hug. It was while he was writing on this. He's, see, this is how, you know, like he, like millennials as a generation, we're gonna have a rough time running for office, most of us, because he seemed to love Reddit. He wrote on Reddit a lot. And that's where he wrote those comments about being a communist. Now he has since said, listen, I'm, I'm not a communist, I'm not a socialist. I'm a small business owner. Don't believe what I wrote on Reddit. I'm just a small business owner. He's a small business owner of a business that he doesn't draw a salary from. See? Nothing. Nothing makes sense. Graham wasn't young when he wrote this. He wasn't a child. He was close to middle age when he declared that he was a communist. And as he gets older, he became more of a communist. And I want you to remember he said, he said communist, not democratic socialist. He didn't align himself with like Bernie Sanders ideology. He said communism, the ideology that killed 60 to 100 million people in the 20th century. Communists, when you look at the death toll, make Nazis look like child's play. Probably why his Nazi tattoo didn't bother him that much. NBC News asked Graham about this and he said, I want to talk about my evolution as a human being. He said, a lot of Americans also want to have the hope that you can change and you can evolve and that we can be in a society with grace and forgiveness to people. Because if we can't, if we can't think of people as just ossified into who they are right now and can never be something different, then what's the point? This is such a nonsensical comment, right? This wasn't. This is from 2021. He wasn't a teenager. I don't believe a 15 year old should be held accountable for what they write on social media for their whole entire life. You were 36, dude. You were not a kid. This is not a million years ago. This was six years ago. But he does, you know, all this evolving and apparently he hasn't evolved from Graham's big Jewish question. See, Platner has a tendency to just accidentally keep finding himself around people who really don't like Jews. And it's not like they're, you know, they're coming to him. He somehow is finding them. In January 2026, a few months ago, he appeared on a YouTube podcast hosted by Nate Karnaccia. I guarantee you I'm slaughtering his last name. I've never watched him. You know why I've never watched him? He's a very well known anti Semitic conspiracy theorist who promoted Holocaust deniers. He has a long history of making up the conspiracies that Israel is behind the Kennedy assassination, 9, 11 and the death of Charlie Kirk. He also that October 7th in Israel was a false flag operation. Now maybe Graham didn't know that before he was going to show. Maybe you know, a PR producer booked him on a show, but when he was on the show he said, I'm a longtime listener and fan. Well, that's weird. The guy with a Nazi tattoo who calls himself a communist till he was 36 is a long time fan of an anti Semitic conspiracy theorist. It almost be a coincidence. And then on February 26th retweeted the social media comments of Stu Peters, another prominent Holocaust denier who he who called Judaism a death cult. Graham said this was just another error. He deleted the post. It's just another coincidence as Graham is full of just ending up in coincidences. Graham's excuse for all this is he just doesn't know. He's just joking on the Internet. He doesn't know. He doesn't know. It's just all a joke. Here's something that I know. When the same thing keeps happening over and over and over, it tends not to be a coincidence. Now let's talk about some public policy positions on, on, you know, the issues that I think is really important that he may not want you to know. That's coming up next. So as I said in the first segment, Graham Planner is a man of coincidence. Things just happen to him. Nazi tattoos, support for anti Semitic podcaster retweeting Holocaust deniers claiming you're a communist into your mid-30s, only to say afterwards it's just not if it's true. It's just, you know, a series of things that have happened to me. He's just a blue collar guy who spent his childhood at expensive boarding schools with deep local political connections. Whose really a man of the people. Although the man's character leaves a lot of questions. What are some policies that he's running on and talking about? One is campaign announcement. He gives a lot of populist platitudes that life for working class people in Maine is unaffordable because of billionaires and corrupt politicians. You know, those are to blame. He says the billionaires are driving us into poverty. Doesn't really explain how. But he, that's, that's a, that's a hot take. His solution to these problems is universal health care, no more wars and more money for veterans. So basically you're, you know, you're. Same talking points from Bernie style, Bernie Sanders style Democrats. That's all it is. Only that's not the only thing he's always said. See, Graham is a guy once. I said once again, he loved Reddit, he loved forums, he loved to talk all the time. Well into his mid-30s when it's, you know, I get, when you're a teenager and you're bored after school and you write on social media, when you're in your mid-30s, you should be doing a little bit more than posting on Reddit. Graham had some strong opinions that I don't think they're making into his ads anytime soon. Graham was deeply obsessed with the Black Lives Matter movement and the Defund the police movement in 2021. Shocking, I know with that kind of background, you can't believe that a guy like that is really into the deep on the police movement. He posted, quote, all cops are bastards and missed police conduct is a, quote, problem that extends deep into the profession as a whole. End quote. See, here's how you know, by the way, the whole working class thing is a shtick and an utter lie. Police aren't just a force to protect innocent people. I mean they are that and that is extremely important. But from a working class perspective, someone who actually grew up working class, whose father was actually a cop, whose uncles were actually cops, and they grew up real poor. The police aren't just a force to protect people. It is a, it is a ladder of social prosperity. If you are working class, like really working class and college is just not your thing, it's out of reach financially. It's you didn't you. You're just not from an education background. You don't have those kinds of brains. Want, we want to take out student loans. How do you manage to get into the middle class? You join a public sector union like the police, like a civil servant job can give you the latter opportunity to make it to the middle class in one generation. There is a deep economic factor behind the police that working class people understand that people like Graham Platner do not. Because he's not working class. He is a show pony. Now his opinions on police, not shockingly extend to ice. He doesn't want to reform ice. He wants dispense it. No immigration enforcement whatsoever. But rest assured, Graham actually is for some type of, you know, law and order. It's just a paramilitary organization. I'm not joking when I say that because Graham belongs. This is according to the main wire. Graham was an active member and taught instruction at the main socialist Rifle association. You may remember when he said he was, you know, a socialist, he. They said he wasn't a socialist. He not only was a socialist and that was a communist, but he actually participated and taught advanced firearm instruction to a power paramilitary group. Surely after the Black Lives Matter movement led to a rise of riots across the country. Once again, he was 35 years old when he did this. He took all his training in the military and by the way, he worked for Black Water. Something else he doesn't like to talk about. They work for a private military organization and he used all those advanced socialist, you know, skills for a socialist agenda for a socialist paramilitary organization that just may need them for self defense. Wonder why. Once again, that also came from Reddit post. Man, this guy loved posting on Reddit. Back in 2013 he also posted that black people are poor tippers at restaurants and said that sexual assault victims need to take responsibility and accountability. But sexual assault victims, Jews, police, they aren't his only target. Grams Graham Platner's ire Runs deep. He also really doesn't like the same people in Maine. He's pretending to support rural whites. See, Maine has the largest population of rural whites in New England, and they actually split their Electoral College votes by congressional district in the presidential election. It's one of only two states besides Nebraska to do that. So Maine 2nd district, which is like, basically 100% rural, they vote for Trump and they give one electoral college vote for Trump. In the last three presidential elections, Trump won main 2nd district by 10 points in 2024, 7 points in 2020, and 10 points in 2016. Back in 2020, someone on his Reddit feed said white people aren't racist or stupid as Trump thinks. And Graham replied, living in white, rural America, I'm afraid to tell you, they actually are. Once again, he wants everyone to look away. He says he. This is what he says now. He's just a white guy from. I'm just a white guy from rural Maine. I know these people. And he. And I'm not a racist. Why would Graham say such a thing, though? This is in 2020. He is well into his mid-30s when he's saying white, rural whites are stupid. And Maine has a large population of rural whites, especially given that Maine 2nd congressional district, that same district he's talking about being full of stupid people. They voted for Obama twice. They voted for Kerry, they voted for Gore, and they voted for Clinton. So why would they vote for Donald Trump? Is it because they're stupid? Or is it because their communities were devastated by open trade with China, by nafta, and by other policies, by the way, policies that Graham very much supports. And it's put Maine in a terrible position. Open trade with China devastated northern Maine, as did nafta. And Graham Platner wants you to understand, he thinks those rural whites in northern Maine, they're stupid and we should work with China. So why would voters in northern Maine, you know, support Trump? Because he opposed the things that destroyed their communities. It was out of self interest. It's not because they're stupid. Why did Graham say that? Because he believes it. Like he believes all cops are bastards. Like he believes the sexual assault victim should take responsibility. I'm not even going to go into his dating life. I. Look, trust me, I did a deep dive in the sky. And there is. He is not kind to women. I'll just say it like that. Or hasn't been, I guess, pre marriage. Maybe he's nice to his wife, I don't know. But as someone who dated, not. Not kind to women. He Believes in communism, he believes in socialism. He is a man of intense privilege, someone who's able to go to the finest boarding schools as a child, go into the military because he was inspired by Ernest Hemingway. I mean, who even says that out loud? He voted. He was voted most likely to start a revolution. And you know, listen, you don't have to be working class to support working class ideologies or to be a populist. Look at Yui Long, Ross Perot, Donald Trump. None of them, none of them were poor and. But they didn't fake it. They didn't lie and say they were, they were honest with who they are. He wants the public to act like the movie Men in Black when they take out that little pen and a light goes off and everyone's memories just wipe clean. He doesn't want you to know what he has said 45 seconds ago. He wants you to have treat him like a completely blank slate and only wants you to know the very narrow vision of who he is that he is, that he thinks is acceptable. No, the true darkness in this man isn't just the fact that he's not working class. It's that he detests workingclass people. And if you ask him, right, if you ask him why would you say these things? He keeps saying, just look at my growth. Look at my growth. Listen, I 100% believe people can grow. A 15 year old, as I said, should not be responsible their whole life or what they write on social media. This was not a 15 year old. This was a 35 year old. This is not somebody who grew. This is somebody saying the truth because he was saying the truth of his opinions when he was 13, when he was 18, when he was 35, all of a sudden, after 30 years of being a communist, of being a radical, of being a protester, of being a champagne socialist, he wants you to understand he is not any of those things. He's just a working class oyster farmer. This is a dangerous, dangerous person. He's doing an impersonation of John Betterman who, you know, likes to flirt with people who hate Jews and thinks they're responsible for all the wars in the world. So if you live in Maine and if you live near Maine, it is your responsibility to get this message out. Graham Platner is a very dangerous individual who is lying to voters about who he actually is and what he believes. Ask Me Anything is next. Now it's time for the Ask Me Anything segment. If you want to be part of the Ask Me Anything segment, email me. Ryanumbers game podcast.com that's Ryanumbers plural numbers game podcast.com first question comes from Tristan. Not sure why, why the GOP White House keep trying to push the save act? It's of not getting 60 votes and voter ID is not going to be anyone's top issue this November. I think it'd be easier to fix the voter integrity issue state by state and we could very well get trifectas in Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan this fall. 1 Blue states aren't going to go with it. And remember, there are a lot of, well, there used to be more, but there are some swing seats in blue states that you would need to win in order to keep the House, like in New Jersey and New York and then there's a few in California that honestly you could still win even with the gerrymander map. And secondly, a lot of people feel like they don't have till November. That November without voter ID is going to be a disaster. So they want to get it done early. And it's something that Trump has this big fight for and I've been very critical of him. But Ken Paxton's campaign putting out that message that he will drop out if they pass the SAVE act was an act of brilliance. It has pushed back the corn and endorsement from Trump. It's not coming out as of right now. It could be coming out later, but it hasn't come out yet. And I think it was an act of genius on part of his campaign. So smart put the ball back on the corner of John Thone and he's gotta, he's gotta pass something or get something along because to avoid this very expensive primary. So, so smart. Okay, next up comes from Dave. Big fan of your show. Are you able to explain why Ohio is now solidly red? I am a millennial. Growing up, I always remember Ohio being considered and the consummate swing state, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Thanks, Dave. Okay, Dave, thank you for listening. As a millennial I days part of the reason is because Ohio, well, because the party has changed is the moral of the story. Because working class whites have become Republicans in greater numbers and more college educated urban people, voters have become more Democratic. Ohio has been benefited from that more than basically anybody else. If you go back to 2008 and 2012, northern Ohio and the Mahoney Valley were solidly blue. I mean, deep, deep Democratic parts of the state and the rural counties in Ohio actually only voted for Republicans by like, you know, they gave them like between 50 and maybe 60% of the vote. Most rural counties did not get more than 60% of the vote in Ohio in 2008, which is shocking now by today's perspective. Fast forward to 2024. Mahoning Valley is Republican. All those areas in northern Ohio are basically outside of Cleveland. Republican it Canton I think is maybe Democratic too, but there's not much that is still Democratic. Most is Republican. And the rural counties instead of giving 50 to 60, are giving a 70 to 85. So you have a 20 point shift among the rurals and you have the entire northern area that used to be Democratic strongholds going maybe 55, 50 for Republicans. And the Democratic Party has basically collapsed. We'll see if it anything swings back this year with, with the upcoming election, given that they have a good Democrats, have a good slate of candidates. But it's kind of hard to see that, you know, that much movement Last question comes from R. Shannon. They write, I don't know if our Shannon's a woman or a man, but our Shannon, you write to me and I appreciate you for listening. Are there any or have there been any politicians who want to increase the voting age? I think personally it should be 21, but probably 25, 18 is far too young. Younger people overall our tumult and want free things also, by the way, old people want free things too. I also side note tangent. It's very scary. These young people are the future leaders. We are raising the dumbest kids ever. I, I kind of think everyone thinks that, that their generation is the dumbest generation ever. I remember when millennials were told that they were the laziest people. And almost every millennial I know is working like 45 jobs trying to hold it together. So I don't know, I don't know the whole I, I will say this. There is a big difference between Gen Z and Millennials in the sense of, and this is a big part of it. The smartphones and the personalized entertainment has definitely created a hard cultural barrier between Gen Z's and Gen Alpha and Millennials and older. Because I grew up and I know I was the only one, I didn't have a TV in my room. We had one TV in the house. I know some people had TVs in their room, but most people I know didn't. Most kids I know didn't. And if you wanted to watch something, you had to kind of watch what your family watched. And there was a lot of jokes being made on, on television shows that were intergenerational, like that old people would get any people would get and you kind of had a better understanding of what of com. Of what they were thinking about, what they were talking about. And more, I guess, more conversation, not my conversations, but more cultural cornerstones of, of things that happened in your past. So it was more of understanding zoomers and alphas. They don't have. They. Everything's personalized to them. They don't have to know or learn about anything. So there is that. I don't call them dumb, though. I don't think they're dumb. Sometimes they're less than smart. But it is what it is. As far as the question goes with the pot with voting age. Yes, Vivek Ramaswamy, he wanted to raise the voting age to 25 when he was running for president. Obviously he never became president, but like the previous question, he might be governor of Ohio. Kind of hoping that doesn't happen, but it might. So anyway, that's the episode. Thank you guys for listening. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you like this podcast, please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast and give me a five star review if you like to. Also on YouTube. Please subscribe on YouTube. I will talk to you guys on Friday.